Modern healthcare requires the interconnectivity of a number of disparate systems. For example, physician practices and laboratories must repeatedly communicate to allow a physician to order one or more tests and for the laboratories to report the results of those tests. In order to permit these disparate systems to connect and communicate with one another, an interface is generally positioned between the disparate systems to facilitate their integration.
Prior to commencing commercial use of an interface to connect multiple disparate systems, the interface is generally tested to ensure that the interface and the resulting intersystem connectivity satisfies the various requirements. These requirements may include, for example, workflow, data integrity and regulatory requirements. In order to test the interface, several stakeholders who are members of different organizations must typically participate, thereby resulting in coordination challenges for the resources required to test the interface.
By way of example in which an interface is intended to support the connectivity between a laboratory and a physician practice, representatives of the laboratory, the physician practice and, in some instances, the electronic health record vendor of the physician practice must meet so as to design the test plan via which the interface will be tested. Thereafter, the laboratory must transmit a plurality of test messages to the physician's practice and the physician's practice, in turn, must evaluate the resulting electronic health record to determine if the test messages were properly received and acted upon. If so, the interface may be considered to be functioning properly. However, if the test messages are not properly received, the interface may be considered to have failed such that further evaluation may be conducted prior to the commercial launch.
As the foregoing example demonstrates, the testing of an interface generally requires the cooperation and the devotion of time and resources concurrently by members of several different organizations. It may sometimes prove challenging to obtain the requisite resources from the various organizations and, in any event, may be even more challenging to coordinate the concurrent availability of those resources in order to property test the interface.